Dear America, this is how you became obsessed with guns

Over the past two decades, America's understanding of who a gun
owner is, and what they own, has changed.

Asked to picture a typical gun owner in the 1990s, you'd have
been right to think of a sportsman, a hunter.

That's no longer the case. But if you think the typical
gun owner today is toting an assault rifle, you'd be wrong.

The truth is that the sales that are driving the industry
— and stock prices — to records, are of handguns.

They're being sold to Americans who have been swayed by
two-decade effort to push guns for protection — all to revive a
once-flagging business.

Americans are buying nearly $2 billion worth of handguns
each year, according to Smith & Wesson, America's largest
gunmaker. And business has been growing: In 2000, there were
10 million National Instant Criminal Background Checks. The
industry uses that figure to understand how many people are
buying guns. In 2015,
that number hit 23.1 million.

What's more, the data points to people stockpiling weapons, not
just buying them. In 1994, a gun-owning household might have four
guns, according to The Washington Post.
In 2013, that number doubled. So just at Smith & Wesson,
total sales — including ammunition and accessories— have
ballooned to over $700 million a year.

So what changed? Yes, the product — and likely in ways you
wouldn't expect. But more important, the marketing changed: The
gun industry changed its story, and that changed America's story.

It's part of how we got to where we are, which is a horrific
place.

A new gun culture

"The problem is we have another culture in our country that, I
think, has gotten confused about its objectives. We have a huge
hunting and sports-shooting culture in America, and unlike many
of you, I grew up in it," President Bill Clinton said in 1999.

He was introducing gun-control legislation following the massacre
at Columbine High School, when two senior students murdered 12
classmates and one teacher.

It was around that same time that gunmakers across the country
were in the midst of trying to figure out a way forward. For
decades, gun ownership had been on the decline as fewer and fewer
Americans took up hunting. The market for fixtures of the
sporting segment was vanishing along with the romantic notion of
the American woodsman.

The National Rifle Association, of course, fought for the
American hunter during every step of this process.

"Make no mistake — our hunting heritage faces threats from all
sides. Its future cannot be taken for granted. At NRA we are
doing everything we can to assure it will be passed on to
Americans of the next century," it said
in a statement following Clinton's 1999 speech.

Pew
Research Center

While it was standing up for hunters, the NRA was also nurturing
an emerging segment of gun owners. People were purchasing weapons
for protection — spurred by the creation of a gun culture based
on fear.

In 1999, 26% of Americans said they owned guns for personal
protection, according to the Pew Research Center. By comparison,
about half said they owned guns for hunting.

By 2013, that statistic flipped, and 32% said they owned guns for
hunting, while 48% said they did for protection.

This was not an accident — it was a project gunmakers had been
working on since the 1980s, according to research from the
Violence Policy
Center, a group campaigning for gun control:

"The National Rifle Association helped stoke sales with a series
of sensational fear-mongering ads aimed at taking 'gun owners'
rights down to gut level.' The ads used garish photos,
inflammatory copy, and hyped headlines to push for the use of
firearms for self-defense. Typical captions included: 'Should you
shoot a rapist before he cuts your throat?' and 'If you're
attacked on your porch, do you want your neighbors to be opposed
to gun ownership or members of the NRA?'

"Gun manufacturers saw the 'personal-defense' market as a
lifeline out of flat handgun sales. For example, then-president
of Smith & Wesson Ed Schultz said in 1992 that he expected to
see growth in this personal protection market. By 1997, Shooting
Industry boasted that 'concealment handguns and other defensive
firearms are the bright spots in gun retailing,' and advised
retailers, 'It's time to jump in on the defensive handgun market
if you haven't already.'"

And so handguns became the big sellers for gunmakers.

"Absolutely it has been intentional," Jason Brown, an NRA
spokesperson, told Business Insider about this push. "For the
past 20 years, there have been repeated attacks on gun owners'
rights. Those law-abiding citizens and the 5 million members of
the NRA see those attacks on the Second Amendment and are
increasingly taking the initiative to arm themselves. They
believe that their self-defense is ultimately their
responsibility."

This "attack" idea doesn't come from nowhere. President Ronald
Reagan was an NRA member and rejected anti-gun legislation until
two years after he left office. Then he flipped,
supporting the Brady Law that required background checks for
potential gun buyers with criminal records or a history of mental
illness. He also supported a 1994 assault weapons ban.

Family
members look at handguns at the National Rifle Association's
annual meeting in 2013.Reuters

The fear business

At Smith & Wesson, handguns made up 81% of firearms shipped
to customers in its fourth quarter. For the year through
April, the company had almost $723 million in sales, up from $552
million in 2014.

In a
conference call with investors last month, CEO James Debney
said that to run with this trend, the company was "obviously
continuing to focus on handguns, personal protection such as the
M&P SHIELD, which remains the number-one selling handgun in
the US today."

Other smaller players in the market have tried to jump into the
handgun market as well, like Remington Outdoor, which entered it
in 2010. By 2013, its 1911 R1 model was generating $325 million
in sales. That's why a year later the company told investors that
it would be aggressively looking for acquisitions to gain more
products in the handgun category.

As Massad Ayoob, a gun
writer and instructor, wrote in an issue of Shooting Industry
magazine in 1993:

"Customers come to you every day out of fear. Fear of what they
read in the newspaper. Fear of what they watch on the 11 o'clock
news. Fear of the terrible acts of violence they see on the
street. Your job, in no uncertain terms, is to sell them
confidence in the form of steel and lead."

And that is what has happened. The NRA and the gun industry
skipped into this future together, and since then they have
remained in lockstep. Gunmakers have little choice, as the
consequences of being out of this rhythm are dire.

Smith & Wesson remains a perfect example of this. The company
was
almost destroyed in 1999 when it tried to develop a "smart
gun" — basically a handgun with a sophisticated lock. The former
CEO, Ed Shultz, wanted to stem the tide of lawsuits against the
industry, which seemed likely to diminish it the way lawsuits
helped to diminish the power and influence of Big Tobacco.

The NRA was furious about this move, though, and told its members
to boycott the company. The gun was eventually scrapped, as was
Shultz. In 2005, the
Bush administration passed legislation protecting gunmakers
from being sued for any violence done with their products.

As for the NRA, they say the do not have any data that proves
that the fear that's leading to more guns in our streets is also
leading to more Americans dying.

Brown, the NRA spokesperson, said the organization could not draw
any "particular statistical correlations between the rise in guns
and the rise in gun violence."

"That's not something we can do," Brown said. "It's something we
won't do."

2008

Gunmakers aren't shy about the fact that Barack Obama's election
in 2008 has been great for business. They get to live in a sweet
spot with Obama's administration — enjoying the threat of gun
control without the real fear of its passage. That's awesome for
sales.

"We experienced strong consumer demand for our firearm products
following a new administration taking office in Washington, DC,
in 2009,"
Smith & Wesson's management said last year. Its stock is
up 933% since January 2009.

Smith & Wesson should love Obama — here's how its
stock has done since he took office in January in
2009.Yahoo
Finance

And again, that demand isn't for the scary-looking assault rifles
associated with mass shootings. The demand is more closely
associated with handguns, which in reality are involved with more
instances of gun violence.

According to a research paper by Harvard
Business School titled "The Impact of Mass Shootings on Gun
Policy," only 0.3% of gun deaths are in mass shootings.

Turns out we're not killing each other in random, horrific
masses. We're killing each other little by little, day by day.

Mass shootings, though, do elicit a policy response on the state
level. The HBS study found that "a single mass shooting leads to
a 15% increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a
state in the year after a mass shooting. This effect increases
with the number of fatalities."

Part of this is because the antigun effort has started to
mobilize against what it considers the real problem here — the
idea that everyone needs a gun for protection.

"The 'need' to arm yourself after a tragedy is a myth perpetuated
by the NRA, which uses fearmongering to sell more guns," said
Kate Folmar, a spokeswoman for Everytown for Gun Safety, told
Business Insider. "That's because they have shifted over the
years from an organization that once represented sportsmen and
hunters to what it is now: the gun lobby that represents
manufacturers."